This is a column I never expected to write. ThatÂ’s because IÂ’m going to applaud Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. This wonÂ’t be unconstrained applause, to be sure. Roosevelt, after all, pursued awful policies that lengthened and deepened the economic misery of the 1930s. can see from this video, the Â“economic bill of rightsÂ” that he wanted after WWII was downright malicious. Truman, meanwhile, was a less consequential figure, but itÂ’s worth noting that he wanted a restoration of the New Deal after WWII, which almost certainlywould have hindered and perhaps even sabotaged the recovery. But just as very...

As published in Palm Desert Patch By Livia Sappington on September 30, 2011 Republishing here now to keep the discussion going and fuel the resistance against "Fundamentally Changing the United States of America". ~~~~~~~~~~~~ How does socialism 'happen?' Read about how seemingly "nice","just", and politically correct ideas can be unfair and jeopardize freedom itself. I am an immigrant from a formerly socialist country who now lives in Rancho Mirage. I arrived in the United States on March 12, 1974. It's been a long journey. If you had my background, you would understand my concerns for the seeping of socialist policies...

In the spirit of the recent holiday, among the many things for which Americans should be thankful is a political decision made more than 67 years ago as the Second World War was beginning to wind down and as the nation’s voters prepared for a presidential election. It was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s finest moments of decision, though admittedly, one he exercised reluctantly. By 1944, FDR was living on borrowed time. It was a hardly a secret that health issues he had been dealing with were reaching critical mass, though only a few insiders had any idea as to the...

One of the most famous speeches in American history is the one given by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, in which he said: “ Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy – The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation, and at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor. Imagine if Obama gave that speech that rallied a nation into World...

FDR, the man who studied Mussolini, who birthed the current intrusive state, who started the drug war in earnest, who put Japanese Americans into concentration camps, who extended the Depression years longer than it needed to be and thereby contributed to the genesis of the Second World War, who tried to pack the Supreme Court, who gave away half of Europe to the Soviets at Yalta, and who confiscated the gold – the real wealth – of the American people. What a guy. And he still has his face on the dime. There is a reason why my grandmother, a...

Mitt Romney’s opening pitch for a third shot at the White House left many Republicans scratching their heads, in part because his plans to fight poverty and tyranny seemed to borrow the lexicon of liberals like FDR, LBJ and Woodrow Wilson. With a full house of Republican National Committee members listening aboard the USS Midway in San Diego, Mr. Romney implored his party last week “to lift people out of poverty” and “to make the world safe.” The first phrase is a favorite of liberals who gush over Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs...

Franklin D. Roosevelt XXXII President of the United States: 1933--1945 9 - Executive Order 9024 Establishing the War Production Board. January 16, 1942 By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and statutes of the United States, as President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, and in order to define further the functions and duties of the Office for Emergency Management with respect to the state of war declared to exist by Joint Resolutions of the Congress, approved December 8, 1941, and December 11, 1941, respectively, and for the purpose...

(Reuters) - A team of Indonesian navy divers on Monday retrieved one of the two black boxes from an AirAsia airliner that crashed two weeks ago, killing all 162 people on board, a government official said. Flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather on Dec. 28, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore. "At 7:11, we succeeded in lifting the part of the black box known as the flight data recorder," Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, the head of the National Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters at a news...

Adm. James Richardson strongly disagreed about permanently docking navy ships in Pearl Harbor, believing that the Japanese would feel threatened by the proximity of America's Pacific fleet and organize a preemptory attack. With their exposed and isolated location, the ships would be vulnerable to any such aggression. He also recognized that the navy did not have the manpower to fight a war in the Pacific in 1940. He relayed these concerns to all who would listen and protested the decision to politicians in Washington. In response, Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt relieved Richardson of his command. This biography covers Richardson's life...

This installment continues by exposing how Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt were Communist lovers both politically and physically; how FDR pulled the dirtiest most disgusting stunt a Democrat had pulled to that time. During Roosevelt’s second term, American sentiment against involvement in Europe’s war grew. Most Americans were opposed to entering a war. Over estimating his mandate in foreign policy as he had in domestic affairs, Roosevelt allowed Britain to convince him to violate our clearly drawn neutrality laws which prescribed keeping a distance from the combatants in Europe and Asia. [37] As a Democrat and dictator Roosevelt...

I was aware of FDR as a left-leaning, communist sympathizer and worse but still this story really illustrates the extent in which it really brought home how far he would go to demonstrate his political sympathies towards his left-leaning communist affiliation. Unfortunately most FREEPERS will not get to see this post and won't get to know the extent in which FDR demonstrated his political proclivity as American dictator during his 'reign' as president. I reminded myself of this terrible page in American history after coming across this article in the Washington Beacon today, details of which are reminiscent of events...

My seventh-grade son recently wrote a U.S. History paper extolling the virtues of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “It ended the Great Depression,” he wrote with great certainty. He’s only 12 and parroting what the history texts and his teachers told him. That’s his excuse. What’s Ken Burns’? Mr. Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts — for those who weren’t bored to tears — repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t...

Ken Burns is at it again. The Left’s favorite propagandist has put together a 7 part series on the two Roosevelt presidents. Leaving aside what he is likely to show about Teddy Roosevelt, without seeing a minute of this presentation I’ll go out on a short strong limb and guess what will not be shown about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even a very superficial study of FDR shows he was a consummate phony. He preached “There is nothing to fear but fear itself,” but everything he did was presented as a fearful crisis that could only be handled by giving him...

NEW YORK (AP) — Police handcuffed dozens of protesters in cities around the country on Thursday as they blocked traffic in the latest attempt to escalate their efforts to get McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food companies to pay their employees at least $15 an hour. The protests, which were planned by labor organizers for about 150 cities nationwide throughout Thursday, are part of a campaign called "Fight for $15."

On this day in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Social Security Act. Press photographers snapped pictures as FDR, flanked by ranking members of Congress, signed into law the historic act, which guaranteed an income for the unemployed and retirees. FDR commended Congress for what he considered to be a "patriotic" act. Roosevelt had taken the helm of the country in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, the nation's worst economic crisis. The Social Security Act (SSA) was in keeping with his other "New Deal" programs, including the establishment of the Works Progress Administration and...

Would Franklin Roosevelt approve of Social Security? The question seems absurd. After all, Social Security is considered the New DealÂ’s signature achievement. It distributes nearly $800 billion a year to 56 million retirees, survivors and disabled beneficiaries. On average, retired workers and spouses receive $1,839 a month Â— money vital to the well-being of millions. Roosevelt would surely be proud of this, and yet he might also have reservations. Social Security has evolved into something he never intended and actively opposed. It has become what was then called Â“the doleÂ” and is now known as Â“welfare.Â” This forgotten history clarifies...

This week Major Theodore Van Kirk, the last surviving Veteran of the Enola Gay that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, joined the rest of his comrades. His passing is a reminder of why using the atomic bomb was the right thing. In August 1945 the Allied Powers, led by the United States, were at war with Imperial Japan in the latter days of World War II. Japan would not give up. For every ten thousand Japanese soldiers that were killed by the Allies only a minuscule amount gave up; usually in the single digits. We were at...

Virtue: A habitual and firm disposition to do the good. Cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Traditional male virtues are strength, courage, independence, heroism in combat, and sexual initiative. For many years, Jesus has been portrayed as a Galilean flower child, walking around the countryside being nice, preaching love and peace, and having a thing for Mary Magdalene. Somehow, this easygoing hippie runs afoul of the corrupt power structure, and ends up dying with career criminals, under horrible circumstances. Of course, even a casual reading of the Gospels reveals something far different. If anything, Jesus is a confrontational,...

Amity Shlaes does not believe in playing it safe. In 2007 she issued the original edition of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, which dared to badly dent the established shibboleths regarding America’s Great Depression and how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal did—or did not—dealt with it. In 2013, she departed the beaten path still more provocatively, resuscitating the reputation of the much-maligned Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge defied all odds and joined The Forgotten Man in achieving best-seller status. Having placed such high-stakes bets and won, she doubled back—and doubled-down—to collaborate on a “graphic” version of The...

Divers from the U.S. Navy will visit the World War II graveyard of the "Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast” — the sunken USS Houston — later this month in a bid to determine what remains of the ship, which went down with more than 700 sailors off the coast of Indonesia. The wreck of the Northampton-class heavy cruiser, which was sunk by the Japanese during the World War II battle of Sunda Strait on Feb. 28, 1942, will be surveyed by Navy divers working with their counterparts from Indonesia. The ship lies about 125 feet deep, near Java, Indonesia,...

Last month, 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon told the remarkable story of Sir Nicholas Winton, a stockbroker in London who saved 669 Czech children-- most of them Jewish--from the Nazis during WWII. England took in almost all of the 669 children. Winton, now 104 years old, told 60 Minutes he had made a desperate plea for help to the United States back in 1939. He said he had written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, describing the plight of the Czech children and asking that America grant refuge to a number of them. "But the Americans wouldn´t take any,

The recent unpleasantness in eastern Ukraine recalls a nagging truth: Wars always bring unintended consequences, and Americans have seen plenty of them, firsthand. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson won reelection on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out Of War!” But Wilson wanted war, and, five months later, he got it. In October 1940, late in the presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt promised “again and again and again” that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” But Roosevelt wanted war, and fourteen months later, he got it. The results were as grim as they were unintended. Over a...

Hereâ€™s your history lesson of the day, and itâ€™s a duzy. Do you all remember the department store chain Montgomery Ward? It was in the same class as JC Penney and Sears, and like Penneyâ€™s and Sears had a robust catalog business in the 20th century. The catalog ended in 1985 and the stores closed in 2000. The incident we are going to talk about happened during World War 2, in 1944. When I read this it initially put my jaw on the floor, but when I thought about it for a moment, I realized that it put all...

This isn’t really new, but some of the most interesting material comes from Rafael Medoff’s demonstration of how the material was buried and misreported by historians sympathetic to liberal presidents. When FDR endorsed quotas for Jews in the US and even North Africa, liberal historians claimed that he was being “practical” or actually trying to help Jews. And then there’s the story of the efforts to bury and lie about FDR’s exchange with Stalin about the Jews.

In a recent speech in Hawaii, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made some interesting predictions about two of the Supreme Court’s most notorious decisions: Kelo v. City of New London, which ruled that government can condemn private property and give it to other private owners to promote “economic development,” and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II. On Kelo, Scalia reiterated his 2011 prediction that the decision will eventually be overruled, stating that it “will not survive.” Kelo was a closely divided 5-4 decision (Scalia voted with the...

In the summer of 1965 Marine Corps Boot camp training included the boast “If it weren’t for the Marine Corps you’d be speaking Japanese.” It was true then and it is still true today. Sixty nine years ago waves and waves of eighteen and nineteen year old Marines, waded ashore on Iwo Jima to defeat the Japanese and help win the war in the Pacific on American terms. They fought to keep us from being the slaves of the Japanese and being forced to end up “speaking Japanese.” By mid- February 1945 Franklin Roosevelt knew Americans were running out of...

Webster’s defines a dupe as “one who is easily deceived.” But a misperception prevails among most people. They think of dupes as ignorant people only. On the contrary, there are large amounts of intelligent dupes in all societies. Brains are no protection against dupery. In fact, I would classify dupery as one of the deadly sins that curse all men and women no matter what level of class and smarts they possess. Dictatorships depend upon dupery to perpetuate themselves – especially dupery among the intelligentsia. There are, in this writer’s opinion, three forms of dupery afflicting the human race, or...

Those of us who track academic bias have long been plagued by a nagging question: when did it start? From the recently published memoirs of one-term president Herbert Hoover, we learn that it’s at least as old as Clint Eastwood. “One day at Stanford, after I left the White House, I asked Professor Roninson, Dean of the History Department, to send me a list of books of required reading by all students in a course on ‘Citizenship,’” Hoover wrote. “I found about one hundred books listed, of which some thirty were objective descriptives of the machinery of our civil government...

The FDR bible used by Mayor Bill de Blasio for his swearing in vanished after the New Year’s Day ceremony, sparking a panicked, hours-long search for the historic tome. “They had the whole detail looking through blankets,’’ a police source said of the scramble by at least 50 NYPD detectives and city officials to find the Bible, which was given to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a gift at his first inauguration in March 1933. Former President Bill Clinton performed the ceremony Wednesday as de Blasio laid his hand on the bible.

The First Lady, who was born on October 11, 1884, became a subject of controversy when people suspected she was romantically involved with journalist Lorena “Hick” Hickok. While the two never publicly addressed their relationship, their letters did nothing to dispel rumors. 1. March 5, 1933: Eleanor to Hick, on the first evening after FDR’s inauguration Hick my dearest— I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. you have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without...

On Sunday, a stunned audience sat in silence as Doris Kearns Goodwin turned the keynote address at the opening ceremony for the 150th anniverary of the Battle of Gettysburg into a political lecture focusing on women's and gay rights. Missing from much of her keynote: Gettysburg. Self-centered, insular, and oblivious to the occasion, the historian who was infamously caught plagiarizing merely recycled much of what she has said before about herself in previous speeches. And her rambling, self-promoting, and borderline inappropriate lecture touched upon nearly everything except for the heroic sacrifices made on that battlefield. In so doing, she desecrated...

It’s difficult to imagine that he was surprised by the outcome. But the White House response that ensued after Author and Journalist Bob Woodward dared to question and criticize the President should be an eye-opener to the world. And the fact that America’s beltway media culture has essentially “sided” with the President and seems quite comfortable with the White House hostility is a very telling sign. Consider the relationship between the presidency and the press over the course of American history. Believe it or not, the White House has been home to lots of outlandish and at times illegal...

Mickey Kaus writes: Do you sense there is some large mass of dark matter, an unseen Scandal Star, the gravitational pull of which is warping the coverage of what seems, on the surface, a pretty dull presidential race? I do. So does Ron Rosenbaum. I thought the Dark Star was the Edwards affair allegation. But Rosenbaum says "everyone in the elite Mainstream media" knows about another juicy scandal that the LAT is supposedly sitting on. I guess this is proof that I’m not in the elite, because I don’t know what he’s talking about. … My vestigial Limbaugh gland tells...

Cynthia Nixon is trying a different kind of sex in the city, the Daily News has learned. For almost 10 months now, the Emmy-winning actress has been dating another woman, sources say. Back in June of 2003, Nixon split with Danny Mozes, the father of her two children. Last January, according to friends, she began a lesbian relationship. Right now, Nixon, 38, does not want to be as outspoken as Rosie O'Donnell, the sources say. But Nixon did not flinch when we asked her yesterday whether she is involved with another woman. Speaking exclusively with the Daily News, she said,...

Freepers, I am looking for a quotation that I was SURE was from Churchill to FDR, only I can't find it anywhere. It went something like this (referring to Britain's situation in 1940): "You will sell us (or give us, don't know which) what we need as long as we can pay for it, and when we can no longer pay for it, you will give it to us anyway." I thought it was in Paul Johnson's book "Modern Times," but it isn't. Anyone know of this?

Editor's Note (1999): In his new book, A Republic, Not an Empire, Patrick Buchanan claims that as of mid-1940 Hitler "was driven by a traditional German policy of Drang nach Osten, the drive to the East." He did not want war with the West, insists Buchanan. (Pp. 268-69.) Why then did Hitler, following Pearl Harbor, declare war on the United States? Buchanan insists this was the irrational act of a madman. In fact, insists Gerhard Weinberg, it was consistent with an objective Hitler had long nourished. It had been an assumption of Hitler's since the 1920s that Germany would at...

On Saturday, Nov. 16, the United States marks a milestone: the 80th anniversary of when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union and "normalized" U.S.-USSR relations. It is a day that should live in infamy. But it's a day that hardly anyone has ever heard of. I certainly hadn't before researching my book, "American Betrayal." As I studied the event, however, it became clear that it was on this day 80 years ago that what I call "American betrayal" began. It is the date on which the U.S. government institutionally learned to lie. After the Bolsheviks seized dictatorial powers...

CBS News reports that the Obama Administration was warned before al-Qaeda attacked the Consulate in Benghazi. Al-Qaeda had posted its three top targets in Libya on its website. These targets were the Red Cross, the British, and then the Americans in Benghazi. By July of 2012 the first two targets had already been hit. In the summer of 2012, Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood, one of the top American security officials in Libya, warned both Ambassador Stevens and the State Department that Benghazi would be next. The CBS revelations were dismissed as “Monday morning quarterbacking” by Secretary of State John Kerry....

BETRAYAL OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY By Alfred E. (Al) Smith [Alfred E. Smith, Democratic governor of New York during four terms, became the Democratic candidate for President in 1928 but lost to Herbert Hoover. In 1932 he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for President, but by 1936 he was so shocked and alarmed by what he saw happening that he decided to warn his Party. Because of the popularity of President Roosevelt this step was considered by some to be virtual treason. Nevertheless, on January 25, 1936, Alfred F. Smith gave the following speech in Washington, D.C., to warn the American ...

India’s temples are resisting divulging their gold holdings - perhaps nearly half the amount held in Fort Knox - amid mistrust of the motives of authorities who are trying to cut a hefty import bill that is hurting the economy. The central bank, which has already taken steps that have slowed to a trickle the incoming supplies that have exacerbated India’s current account deficit, has sent letters to some of the country’s richest temples asking for details of their gold. It says the inquiries are simply data collection, but Hindu groups are up in arms. “The gold stored in temples...

Here's my response to Commander Zer0's verbal assault on reason that took place last night. I realize that our Dear Leader's plans to provide al-Qaeda air cover may not materialize, but keep this in mind: We have a failing dictator who's willing to start world War III to distract the country from his varied scandals and Zimbabwe-like economy. Anything is still possible with this pile of human debris in the White House. Without further ado: *** For the last couple of days, we've been exposed to an endless stream of war propaganda in support of Chairman Obama's Syrian adventure. Without...

The 50 year anniversary of Martin Luther King's march on Washington is causing a lot of people in my generation to reminisce. In doing so, it is hard not to be struck by two puzzling facts: (a) the fall of racial barriers to success almost everywhere and (b) the lack of economic progress in the black community as a whole, relative to whites. On the one hand, it would seem that a black in America can achieve almost anything, even being elected president of the United States. On the other hand, if we compare the economic condition of blacks and...

My parents were New Deal Democrats, but I grew up at a time and in a place when Republicans were extraordinarily rare. I’ve often said I never actually met a Republican until I went to college and, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t until my junior year. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-30s that I became an ex-Democrat, and so I completely understand the quasi-religious reverence that Democrats have for FDR, Harry Truman and JFK. What puzzles me nowadays is that some conservatives seem to share that attitude. National Review has published a...

This Fall, Harvard University Press will release The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, by the 35-year-old historian Ben Urwand. Alexander Kafka previewed the book in The Chronicle Review. “Urwand found that Nazi officials considered some American films ideologically useful—among them Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Our Daily Bread (1934), and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)—and that the studios expressly marketed certain titles in that vein,” Kafka writes. “ For instance, Gabriel Over the White House, an American fascist fantasia about a fed-up, divinely inspired president dissolving a chaotic Congress and whipping the...

According to Soviet intelligence reports, we now know that one of FDR’s top officials, the Treasury Department’s Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet agent, who, among many other deceptions, subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting “ultimatum” language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack. This was language written in Moscow, passed to White by a Soviet handler in Washington, D.C., and dropped into a State Department communiqué sent to Japan. This brilliantly executed influence operation doesn’t live in infamy – at least not yet. ... “A continuous stream of fighter and pursuit planes is...

Little known is it that FDR is not the first president to have relocation camps, and Japanese Americans were not the original target. Nearly 30 years prior to World War two, German Americans were the targets and the most interesting thing is that very little is written about this. History has been virtually expunged of this topic. Historians do not write about it, so history books don't contain it, and even from various news journals at the time it was largely unreported. When it was reported, some of the blurbs on it were small and not noteworthy. The first American...

INDIANAPOLIS — A professor at an Indiana college says he has found film footage showing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt being pushed in his wheelchair, depicting a secret that was hidden from the public until after his death. Ray Begovich, a journalism professor at Franklin College south of Indianapolis, said Tuesday he found the eight-second clip while conducting unrelated research in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The National Archives and the FDR Presidential Museum and Library couldn’t say for certain if other such footage exists but both said it is at least rare.

American POWS sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area. The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to...